Culture and the 'Natural' Woman

Paper Summary:

Despite being written over 200 years apart, "A Father's Legacy to his Daughters" and "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" both have a similar agenda - to advise women on how to be more desirable to men. This paper explores exactly how and why this effect is attained and how the consequence of such advice constructs a 'natural' woman who, paradoxically, changes through history to suit the needs of the cultural moment. Finally, the paper refers to Thomas Lacqueur's "Making Sex" to make sense of this cultural phenomenon.

From the Paper:

"In today's more enlightened era, we may expect the 'natural' woman to have been purged from conduct literature. On the contrary, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, published over two hundred years later than A Father's Legacy, continues to attribute women's behavior to nature, for example, 'an instinctive need to talk about what's bothering them' . His implication here that the female stereotype has evolved according to the needs of survival is characteristic of the pseudo-scientific evidence often cited in conduct literature. In reality it is completely unfounded, and, what is more, highly improbable. In his space travel analogy, he makes an even more surprising claim: 'though from different worlds, they [men and women] reveled in their differences' (p. 9)."

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